Shoots & Leaves 1.2

When I first had the idea for Shoots & Leaves, it was all about to-do lists. I wanted to turn photos into links so that I could easily use them as plain text anywhere. After the app launched I heard from several people who thought it would make a great mobile blogging app. That had never occurred to me while I was working on it, but I realized it was the natural way for the app to expand. So I started looking into what services I needed to support to make it useful to bloggers.

Today we’re releasing Shoots & Leaves 1.2. Besides bug fixes and general improvements, this version includes the following new features:

Support for uploading to Amazon S3

Support for uploading to SFTP

Support for uploading to a WordPress blog

Support for sending to the WordPress App

Support for sending to the DayOne App

URL scheme for calling Shoots & Leaves from another app.

That last one is another biggie. Interacting with other apps is what makes Shoots & Leaves a powerful tool. And now other apps can interact with it. You can read the documentation of our URL scheme to find out how to use it.

Here’s an example of how you might use this. A user asked the other day if it was possible for Shoots & Leaves to launch the LoseIt app after copying the photo link to the clipboard. With the new URL scheme, and an app like Launch Center Pro, it is. Just create a clipboard action in Shoots & Leaves and name it “LoseIt”. Then add an action to Launch Center Pro with this URL:

When you run that action from Launch Center Pro, it will launch Shoots & Leaves and change the current action to your “LoseIt” action. After you take your picture and save the URL to the clipboard, it will launch the LoseIt app.

I think there’s a lot of potential uses for this URL scheme. If you do something fun with it, please let us know.

I hope you’ll give this new version a try. If you like it, please take a moment to rate it in the App Store. It helps us and it helps other people discover the app. If you have feature requests, bug reports, or questions send them to us.

And just so you know, I’m working on the next version already. It will launch with iOS 8 with support for sending links and text to other apps via their app extensions. I’m also working on an extension for Shoots & Leaves, so you’ll be able to upload photos and run actions from any camera/photo app that supports it. If that’s not ready on launch day, it will be soon after. I’ll keep you posted.